Apartment building fire and firefighters

Driving down a rural road the other night, I saw this fire in progress. Luckily I had my camera with me, so I pulled over, put on the telephoto lens and grabbed some pictures.

Processed entirely in Raw Therapee.

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Yikes, those are some burning highlights :sweat_smile: (Though I do hope no one got hurt)

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The local paper wrote about the story, and used two of my pictures for their article. No people got hurt, but some house pets died and 6 people have to find another home. The fire started because of an electrical problem with a water pump.

I actually have another really good shot where you see the fireman and right in front of him a bunch of blue electric sparks jumping at him out of the fire.

This was a really interesting series of pictures for me to take, and gives me more appreciation for photojournalists. Not only are you worrying about getting a good shot, composing the pictures, etc, but I was also worried about staying out of the way of the working firemen, worrying about getting run over by a car since it was in a rural area - no street lights and I was dressed in dark clothes. Also worried about what the people who lived there thought. They were all huddled together to watching their home burn down and their pets get cooked. Everything is happening so fast and your brain has to move fast to stay out of the workers’ ways, all while you’re scanning for pictures. Crazy experience. I imagine that for people like war photographers it’s even more hard core.

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Wow. Good shot, given the conditions you had to work with. My photojournalism major friend wants to be a war photographer, so your paragraph was kind of familiar. It can get quite intense, based on some of the photos he showed me his war photography heroes took, and their backstories. He showed me pictures with mines exploding on people and vultures hanging around kids that were starving to death. Pretty crazy stuff. Me, I feel like just sticking to landscapes and macro of bugs and crystals.